


we must not be ruined

by alpacas



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers for episode 50, and then veered off into angst, as well as for the last few episodes, because it's caleb's pov and that's all the man knows, i really do not intend to keep writing critrole fanfic but STUFF KEEPS HAPPENING WITH NOTT, mild warning for caleb's pov being a black hole that absorbs and warps all who dare approach, mild warning for descriptions of injuries but not more than the show does it i think, started off as a straight reaction to 50's last half hour, this story would be hilariously different if it was nott's pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-21 05:23:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17636741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacas/pseuds/alpacas
Summary: oops: it happened again.





	we must not be ruined

**Author's Note:**

> title paraphrased from george saunders' 'lincoln in the bardo:'
>
>> But we must do so, and believe in it, or else we were ruined.
>> 
>> And we must not be ruined.

Nott is dazed and quiet as the two clerics converge on her, as Beau hisses _fuck_ to herself, her arms extended from her body, skin peeling and raw. Fjord puts his hand on Beau's shoulder — "'m okay. I mean, fuck, this fucking hurts, but I'm okay —" and Jester speaks in a high scared voice that overcuts Beau's hissing: "I'm so sorry, I have no more spells, but you'll be okay, you're okay," and Caduceus says something soft and soothing, the two of them hiding Nott's tiny body from view, and all Caleb can smell is burnt flesh.

He's sitting on the ground and does not remember how he got there, or really where they are. Last thing he remembers is Nott looking at the river of fire from too far away. Then nothing. Then this. Burning flesh, ashes, flame, blood, the own sharp sour smell of his sweat, his neck and arms and back soaked and cold, the weak murmuring feeling of magic in the air.

_I mean yeah I'd fucking love a healing spell but I'm not gonna die from this or anything as long as we don't have to punch something else anytime soon — if we just rest a bit — do you have any more magic? — i'll carry you as long as we have to, don't worry! and once i have more spells — fjord i think we should make camp jester and i are — yeah that seems smart can you look at beau —_

He'd counted figures crossing the chamber. He hadn't forgotten Nott, but he had not considered her. She was small and sneaky and he had been more worried for the larger, clumsier members of the party, more worried for _himself_ , that it was only when Fjord had made it that he, too, had suddenly —

— _hey you okay_ —

It's a voice coming from far, far away. He blinks, but he sees nothing before or after. Blinks again, wills his mind to clear, even just a little —

He is sitting on the floor as if he'd fallen on his ass and not moved. Yasha is sitting next to him, on her knees, wide eyed, her lips parted in fearful concern. He manages to nod. To move his head up, and then down, exactly one time.

"That was frightening," Yasha says softly, and this time he actually hears the words, hears something being said and not just noises in his vicinity.

" _Ja_ — _ja,_ it was," he says, his voice dry and cracked.

"I think everyone is okay, though," she says. "You know." He's looking at Jester now, who is holding Nott in her lap. The others — he is aware of their existence, peripherally. Tall shapes gathered together around the shortest of the three. Doesn't really see or care. Nott's green skin is pale, ashen, with whitish shiny burns only just healed over. Her bandages and most of her clothing has been removed (or burnt away — he tastes bile), leaving just her undershirt and bony limbs, exposed and burnt, a dark purple red where the wounds had been deepest. Jester has Nott's head and shoulders in her lap and is playing with her hair — no. Is picking through it with a small knife, cutting the burnt ends away. Jester's expression is gentle, she's talking as she works, but Nott's eyes are closed. One of her ears is partially burnt away.

She does not look like a halfling woman, a wife and mother, determined and brave and stubbornly kind. Nor does she look like Nott, clever and reckless, her eyes often wide with retroactive awareness, half grinning. As clever as Caleb ever was, without the flaws he'd had at her age — the self importance, the seriousness, the grand designs and ambitions that had turned and ruined him. She should have been handpicked for greatness, not him —

— and now she just looks tiny and fragile and broken.

He wants to move and he cannot.

"I know how hard it is," Yasha murmurs, her voice only quieter the more aware he becomes: Caduceus and Fjord flanking Beau, her burns examined, another debt, the greatest debt, he now owes her, and he will — he will find a way to thank her, to —

"You see it happen to the person you love, and you just want to run away."

He chokes on himself. Yasha is looking away, at the ground, playing with a pebble or a bit of dirt. He doesn't know what to say or think or how to react or move his face — and then he finds movement, and scrubs at his face with his hand.

"Oh, what a mess we all are," he mutters.

"We can help each other," she says.

He will say more to Yasha later — he decides, makes it into a footnote, a memo, figure out how to say something kind and then do it, probably draw her aside, but for now Caleb lurches awkward to his feet. Makes it a drunken few steps to sink before Nott and Jester, the latter still combing the burnt acrid hair away.

The smell is painful. He wants to vomit, but the taste in his mouth suggests he already has at some point, in the moments he cannot remember — it's all sour and bile and empty, a burning in his throat. He knows what flesh burning smells like. Looks like. What wood burning, metal melting and twisting, singed earth, cloth crumbled to ash, the popping noises of lighter materials igniting, the crashing of glass, windows breaking from the pressure of the hot air and flames, mixed strangely with the scent of wet grass, fresh and strong with pre-dawn dew, so that for a time wet grass and acrid smoke were tied together for him, leaving him ill in the mornings —

"Short hair is much cuter anyway," Jester is saying as he slumps to the ground. "Don't you think so?" she looks up at Caleb as she asks — she saw him coming. Her voice is light but her expression grave and worn, as is his, as is all of theirs.

"Ah — yes," he says, reflexively, hardly listening. He looks at Nott and then focuses on a ribbon on Jester's skirt — forces his gaze back to the shiny purple burn running from tiny shoulder to elbow, digging deep into her flesh, the colors gradating — back to the ribbon. To her legs, hidden under Jester's cloak, laid over Nott's lower half like a blanket. To Nott's face. Her eyebrows are mostly singed away.

"You know… I'm starting to think using these tunnels weren't the best plan," Nott murmurs, her voice hoarse and very quiet. Her eyes remain closed, but the corner of her mouth twitches. Just a bit.

He'd thought her unconscious. "You're awake! How are you feeling? Are you —" of course she's hurt, stupid, just look at her. Of course she isn't fine, idiot, she almost burnt to death before your eyes.

"I feel okay, actually," Nott says. "It doesn't hurt. I'm not… I'm not just saying that to be cool. It really doesn't hurt much."

"That's because the burns took out most of your pain sensing nerves," Jester chirps. "It'll hurt a _lot_ later on. But by then we'll probably have more healing spells!"

For every last drop of healing magic they'd had to leave Nott still so wounded… he wants to grasp her hand, but is afraid that it, too, must be burnt and peeling. He looks, and is horrified to see the marks of her bandages burnt into her skin, clear lines crisscrossing her wrists and forearms. A ring, burnt black, searing the flesh of her finger.

"I have never been more glad that you gave Nott that ring," Caleb says, his voice half exhale.

"Right?" Jester says, smiling nervously. "Who would have thought that Nott's weird but _totally understandable now that we all know it wasn't just a silly quirk_ fear of water would come in handy?"

Nott gives a coughing laugh. She opens her eyes at last — they're red and bloodshot from the heat and smoke, and she looks over at Caleb blearily. "How are you doing?" she asks.

"Do not — do not ask me that," he says, stumbling, his voice coming out stronger than he'd expected. "Do not ask me that after this."

"I know it probably looked pretty bad on your end," Nott says, glancing up at Jester. Jester looks confused, patting Nott's singed hair absently.

"It was really scary for all of us!" she says, her tone half scolding.

"I'm gonna go ahead and say it was Fjord's fault," Nott says in half a whisper, her eyes fluttering closed again. Jester bites back a smile.

Caleb rocks forward and back on himself, inside himself. How can she have concern for him? In this moment? At this time? For his feelings and his fears? "Jester, may I take over for you?" he grits out, furious at himself for needing so much.

"Sure!" Jester gives him a smile laden with meaning that he thoroughly ignores, and she carefully, gently picks up Nott and they rearrange themselves, so that he has her tiny body in his arms, resting against his chest and in his lap, her head against his arm like she's a child. She is not. He knows that now more than ever, but the feeling — how does he deserve to love someone so? To want to protect her so badly? To exist in the front of her mind, to be the front of her concern, even when he knows now more than ever he does not deserve it, she has others, more worthy of her time?

She sighs against him.

"You must be tired," he says.

"My eyes are really sore, I'm not _that_ tired. But kinda, yeah." Caleb looks over at Jester, now checking on Beau, her arms wrapped in clean bandages, a grimace on her face. Fjord has gone down the tunnel a little ways with Yasha, perhaps to scout. Caduceus is in the midst of summoning food. It does not appear as though any of them will be moving far. Nott is the worst but not the only exhausted and injured.

"I thought you were lost," he says. She smells of charred flesh and burnt hair and singed cloth, he wants to gag and vomit but does not.

"No way," Nott says, with surprising firmness: she's a fretter and prone to panic, just as he is really. "I'm not… I'm not giving up for a second, not until I get Yeza home safely."

He tries to smile, but it feels strained — twisted, in the way things have been for the past week or so, as he tries to bring these two people together, the wife and mother and co-owner of an apothecary, and Nott, who has always seemed to belong in some way to him, belong to _Caleb_ , tied entirely to that randomly chosen name and identity: a friend he had not wanted or sought and who now, he fears, will soon be gone. He will not stop her. Truly, he can understand. She has a family waiting for her, and he wishes her happiness from the bottom of what is left of his heart. He will not begrudge her.

It was just that he had always assumed Nott as alone as he was.

"I am glad you have found this new strength," he says, sincerely, knowing her fears and anxieties and reliance on her flask to push her forward. If a newfound courage will lead her to her husband, he is happy to witness it. She deserves not to drown in self loathing. At least one of them should.

"I think you'll get along," Nott says. Her voice is quiet, and he's so busy preparing for their future farewell, so busy trying to not notice how her form is smaller and lighter with her limbs barely reformed, badly burnt, how acrid the smell is and how tiny, truly fragile, her body has always been —

"Sorry?"

"You and Yeza. I think you'd actually hit it off. Which isn't something I'd say about everyone and you, you know," she says with a hoarse laugh, a single tired _heh_.

He blinks.

"He's not as much of a reader as you, but… he likes to go on long walks in the woods and fields and things, looking for plants and rocks and stuff, just like you do for your spells. And he's terrible with money. You turn around and he's spent the two gold you have on juniper berries." Nott falls silent so abruptly he's concerned.

"He… sounds nice," Caleb says cautiously.

"It's funny. I put him … and Luke … out of my mind as much as I could for a long time. And then it was just a secret I had. Sometimes I almost felt like I made it all up. Because I hated being a goblin so much." Nott opens her eyes, touches her finger and blackened ring gently with her other hand. Winces but doesn't linger on the wound. "Now that everyone knows, it's all I can think about again. I'm sure Yeza will like you."

"I feel as though I will like him as well," Caleb says, truthfully enough, because anyone who Nott loves and who loves Nott must be a good egg, although it leaves a sour taste in his mouth. He loves Nott, that is not a secret, that is something that crept up upon him months ago, months and months, some morning when he'd woken up and felt such a strange fondness looking at her that he'd been frightened by the understanding.

It had been the only time he had ever considered leaving her and not looking back.

"Good," Nott says with a satisfied smile.

He loves Nott, yes, but it is not a romantic love (although his affection for her is such that he finds her rather adorable, he is not attracted to goblins, or anything really, anymore). It is the sort of love that has always assumed she will always be at his side to return it.

Soon she will go, and her time almost came only an hour before.

She nestles herself closer to him, her eyes closed again. She will sleep soon, he can tell — he knows her enough to tell that, the way her singed ears droop and she presses herself, as though trying to wedge herself into the gap between his side and his arm, she's always liked to sleep in corners — and he pets awkwardly at her burnt-away hair with his other hand, feeling sick and a pain he cannot word and will not ever express.

Not to her. Not to someone who deserves this future happiness more than anyone else. "I look forward to the day we reunite with him," he tells her. "From now on, I will — I will do all I can to not be a bloody coward, and I will get you to your family no matter what it takes."

To the day we say goodbye, he means.

But she's already fallen asleep in his arms.


End file.
